The new offering is a collaboration between Red Hat and Amazon. Red Hat takes care of the base RHEL images, which means users will get updates at the same time they are made available. That helps with reliability and security, and certified applications maintain their supportability, Amazon said.

Like enterprises, government agencies need the ability to quickly access computing resources using hosted environments like GovCloud, while still running applications on RHEL, according to Red Hat. As agencies determine their cloud strategies, the ability to use the OS for both on-premises deployments and in the cloud is key, the company said.

GovCloud users can launch RHEL directly from the EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Launch Wizard in Amazon's dedicated management console. There are 13 on-demand server sizes to choose from, and they cost between $0.084 and $2.830 per hour.

Agencies can also choose to run their applications on Amazon's own Linux servers (the cheapest option), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Windows.

For government IT staff that want to learn more about GovCloud, Amazon is organizing a webinar entitled "Intro to AWS GovCloud (US) Region" on March 12 between 1:30 and 2:30 p.m. ET.